SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:
A Tennessee woman on death row survived a failed execution attempt last night. Christa Gail Pike was sentenced to death for killing Colleen Slemmer in 1995 when both of them were teenagers. Catherine Sweeney, with WPLN in Nashville, was a media witness, and she joins us now to tell us what she witnessed. And please note this could be a tough conversation to listen to because it's likely to include a detailed description of what happened yesterday. Hi, Catherine.
CATHERINE SWEENEY, BYLINE: Hi, Sacha.
PFEIFFER: What did you see and hear at the prison last night?
SWEENEY: Well, it started before last night. So I was there as one of the seven media witnesses. We get there at 8:30 in the morning. Usually, it's over sometime around 11, but we were there for 13 hours while the Supreme Court went back and forth on whether they would block this execution or not. But we found out around 6 p.m. that we would be viewing this execution.
So we went into the witness bay. That's a cinder block room with a window into the death chamber. We got in there around 6:45. So there's a curtain over that window, and that's so that we can't see the medical workers placing the IV lines. Their identities are shielded by state law. Usually, that takes 10, 15 minutes. It took 45 because they had such a hard time getting needles into her. So eventually, the curtains did open, and she was really lively and talking and singing for a long time, even longer...
PFEIFFER: After getting an injection.
SWEENEY: That's right. She should have started to look sedated, but didn't. They closed the curtain. And usually that's when the doctor comes out and calls time of death, but he didn't. So they tried again. They opened the curtains. They did it all again. And that didn't go really any better.
PFEIFFER: So as this is going on, what is the mood in the room you're in? What are people talking about?
SWEENEY: Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, everyone's shocked. The protocol does say they can do this twice, but that seems like this absurd reality. And then it did happen twice. And they closed the curtains and never opened them again. And I think that is what led to things getting pretty heated between the media witnesses, including me, and the communications director. We didn't know why the curtain was closed. We know the doctors not in there assessing her for 30 minutes to 45 minutes, which is how long we were sitting there hearing her over the loudspeaker snoring and breathing raggedly, but we couldn't see her. And I was asking, are you going to try again? Are you going to resuscitate her? We're just sitting here for so long. Like, what is happening? And we didn't get any answers to those questions.
PFEIFFER: No explanation at all from prison officials.
SWEENEY: No.
PFEIFFER: So how did this resolve? - for you, at least.
SWEENEY: For us, at least, the warden came over the loudspeaker after, I mean, you know, two hours of trying. The warden came over the loudspeaker and said, you need to leave. So we did. We go outside to do the press conference that's part of the witness process. And ambulances come to pick her up. There's this wave of emergency vehicles, and they carted her away with sirens on, so we guessed she was still alive.
PFEIFFER: And we now know that she is alive, and we will obviously be continuing to follow this story very closely. That is Catherine Sweeney with WPLN in Nashville. Thank you for your reporting.
SWEENEY: Thanks, Sacha. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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